


cake by the pound

by wrishwrosh



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Bakery, M/M, Unrealistic Portrayals of Customer Service
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-13
Updated: 2017-04-13
Packaged: 2018-10-18 10:52:56
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,806
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10615398
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wrishwrosh/pseuds/wrishwrosh
Summary: "Hot Jack came in to the bakery during a run, and he was a little bit sweaty in a glowing, Adonis kind of way. Bitty was also a little sweaty, in a greasy, one minute ago he had his whole torso in a literal dirty oven kind of way. Jack ordered his soon-to-be-usual triple vanilla, and Bitty fell in love. Or, well. He fell in something ."Bitty works in a cake shop. Jack is his new best customer.





	

**Author's Note:**

> this is inspired by a tumblr post i saw like six months ago (which is how long i've been working on this 3k fic) that i now can't find for the life of me and also by the cake shop i used to work at.
> 
> as always i owe everything to foot girl.
> 
> title from yonce, because of course it is.

Bitty is knee-deep in tiny cheesecakes for the Chen-Vreeland wedding when Lardo sticks her head through the swinging door of the back room.

 “Yo, Bits, Hot Jack is back. Do you want me to fake a buttercream emergency so you can take his order again?” she asks in an exaggerated stage whisper, waggling her eyebrows at him.

 “Last time you faked an emergency I still had to spend two hours cleaning dried frosting out of the buttons on the register, and Dex _will_ have an aneurysm if he has to remake another six pounds of buttercream.”

 Lardo grins. “So, does that mean you want me to take his order? Did I mention that he’s wearing leggings again?”

 Bitty levels a halfhearted glare at her. Her smile just widens. She knows she has him beat.

 Bitty wipes his cheesecake covered hands on his apron, slaps on his customer service smile, and slips through the door to the front desk. True to Lardo’s word, all six feet and change of Hot Jack are loitering nervously by the door, poking at the styrofoam display cakes in the window in blatant violation of the very clear “No Touching The Cakes” sign Ransom put up last week.

 When Bitty announces his presence with a jaunty “Welcome to The Cakery!  What can I do for you today, sir?” Hot Jack whirls around and blushes furiously.  Bitty tries and fails not to be charmed.

 “I, uh, I’d like to buy a cake?” says Hot Jack.

 It’s a good thing he’s cute, thinks Bitty. Out loud, he says, “Absolutely! I swear, if you keep coming back here we're gonna have to get you a punch card.” They don’t have punch cards, but Bitty is not above designing and disseminating some himself.

 “Oh, ha, I'll probably be back. Got a lot of, uh. Birthdays coming up,” says Hot Jack.

 “Well goodness, maybe you should start making these cakes yourself! Save a little money, you know.” Encouraging customers to bake their own cakes is the literal opposite of Bitty’s job, but oh fucking well.

 “I don’t think I could make cakes this good on my own," Hot Jack responds. “You’re very talented.”

 “Aren’t you a flatterer!” Bitty can sense Lardo’s eyes on him. He’s about to blush, and if he blushes Lardo will take a picture and probably put it on a cake. He gets down to the business of the actual cake, for no other reason than to stop her snooping.

 Bitty gets most of the way through his usual preliminary cake questions—what flavor, what filling, what size—before he realizes he’s only been making eye contact with Hot Jack’s cheekbones. Oh well. They’re great cheekbones.

 Just like every time, Hot Jack orders a birthday cake, vanilla cake with vanilla cream filling and vanilla frosting, royal blue and yellow accents. This time, it’s for some person named “Tater? No, wait, Alexei. No, Tater.”

 When he hands over his card to pay, Bitty manfully and professionally avoids looking at Hot Jack’s last name, because he isn't a creep and he really doesn't need to enable Ransom and Holster’s Facebook stalking habit.

Bitty hands back the card with what he happens to know is his cutest smile. (Lardo says it brings out hints of dimple. He may or may not have practiced it extensively in the mirror.) This turns out to be a tactical error, because Hot Jack offers the sweetest, most dazzling little smile in return.

Bitty’s inner southern belle swoons. Bitty’s outer southern belle also swoons a little bit, but his accompanying outer customer service employee gets his shit together and covers.

“You have a nice day now,” he says, as though he is not internally clutching his heart and fanning himself.

Hot Jack turns around and waves before he leaves.

Lardo was not lying about the leggings.

As Hot Jack walks out the door, Lardo materializes behind Bitty and raises her eyebrows.  With absolutely none of the subtlety and tact Bitty knows she's capable of, she points directly at his ass and whispers, “Hate to see him leave, but…”

Bitty glares at her, but it’s not like he can disagree.

 

+

 

Hot Jack is a new regular at The Cakery Custom Cakes, and he is a problem.  He comes in every Tuesday morning like clockwork to order a small, boring birthday cake for a succession of friends, or possibly coworkers.  He is also unbelievably beautiful, and fucking _stacked_.  Bitty is pretty sure he stops by the store while he’s on about mile five of his morning run, which Bitty sometimes thinks about while he eats cake scraps for breakfast with his hands.  

Hot Jack has incredible bone structure and very pretty eyes and Bitty is pretty sure he’s straight, because Bitty is an optimist but he is also about seventy percent sure that Hot Jack is a hockey player.  There can only be so many exceptions to one rule, and half of them already work in this store.  

Still, no one can stop him from dreaming.

 

+

 

Despite his natural charm and the way people in Providence tend to go nuts for his accent, Bitty actually doesn’t handle the front counter. He’s head baker, so he usually spends his shifts up to his elbows in batter in the back room while Chowder and his sunny grin charm customers. Bitty only steps into the front room when both Chowder and Lardo are busy because Ransom and Holster, bless their noisy hearts, can’t be trusted with customers.

So really, it was just chance that Chowder was on the phone and Lardo was in the middle of some tricky piping when Hot Jack walked into the store for the first time.

Hot Jack came in to the bakery during a run, and he was a little bit sweaty in a glowing, Adonis kind of way. Bitty was also a little sweaty, in a greasy, one minute ago he had his whole torso in a literal dirty oven kind of way. Jack ordered his soon-to-be-usual triple vanilla for an evocatively named Guy, and Bitty fell in love. Or, well. He fell in _something_.

The first time Hot Jack showed up, Bitty took his order because of astounding and beautiful luck. The following times, however, weren't so much luck as really transparent meddling.

Bitty isn’t going to complain, but if Christopher Chow keeps throwing all 5 feet 11 inches of his lanky goalie body headfirst under a decorator’s table the second Hot Jack walks in the door, it’s going to get obvious.

Once, Chowder just drops into a full split behind the counter right when Hot Jack arrives, and the whole shop, including Jack, breaks into surprised and spontaneous applause.

 Lardo doesn’t bother with the hiding and dramatics. She usually just looks Hot Jack directly in the eyes and walks away to find Bitty without comment.

 Bitty doesn’t think Hot Jack is getting the best image of how The Cakery operates. He also doesn’t really care.

 

+

 

On a rare Tuesday when Ransom and Holster are both on shift, Hot Jack shows up with an older, slightly taller version of himself in tow. Bitty opens his mouth to take their order, and is interrupted by a giant rattling crash. When he turns around to look, Ransom appears to have collapsed face-first into a stack of empty cake pans. Next to him, Holster squeezes a tin of dragees so hard that it ruptures and spills dozens of pearls across the floor.

 Bitty only opened the dang shop 45 minutes ago. It is much too early to deal with this.

 When Bitty turns back to face the counter, Hot Jack 1.0 is nobly attempting to hold in laughter while his son tries to hide behind an elaborate fake wedding cake. It’s really something to watch, given how broad Hot Jack’s shoulders are.  By Bitty’s estimation, he probably deserves some kind of award for taking their order with a completely straight face. (Chocolate with coffee buttercream for an Alicia—very out-of-the-box.)

 As he runs the card through the blessedly slow machine, he idly says, “So, another birthday? Y’all must be so busy.”

 Hot Jack The Elder offers up a truly shit-eating grin. “Oh yes,” he says. “So many birthdays. How convenient that they’re all on Tuesday!” Hot Jack The Younger appears to be melting.

 The second the door swings shut behind the pair, Holster and Ransom materialize on either side of Bitty at the front counter and immediately begin babbling over top of each other.

 “Bitty—”

 “Bits—”

 “—Eric Richard Bittle—”

 “—Holy shit, holy _shit_ —”

 “—Why in the everloving _fuck_ were we not informed that Hot Jack is _Jack fucking Zimmermann_ —”

 “—ohmygod, _Bad Bob_ was just in our store, holy shit, I’m never mopping that floor again—”

 “—I just fell the fuck over in front of multiple generations of insane hockey talent, Bitty, I’m going to die—”

 At some point in this tirade, Ransom has managed to snag Bitty in a bear hug and lift him off his feet. Holster is grabbing Bitty’s cheeks and gently shaking his head back and forth.

 When Holster blurts out, “—holy shit, Bitty, you have a _secret crush_ on _Bad Bob Zimmermann’s kid_ —”  Bitty has to extract himself and go sit in the dark in the office for a little while. As he shuts the office door, he hears Ransom shout something about “cause of death: that ass!” and privately concurs.

 At home that night, Bitty googles ‘bad bob zimmermann’ and then he googles ‘jack zimmermann’ and then he googles ‘jack zimmermann bi’ and then he googles ‘jack zimmermann out magazine cover’. It’s an altogether illuminating evening.

 

+

 

The next week, Bitty’s embroiled in an in-depth discussion with a deeply argumentative mother-to-be about the precise color of fuchsia for her ugly gender reveal cake (minute thirty seven, by the count on the store’s landline) when the bell over the door rings and Jack walks in. Bitty smiles and waves like a good customer service representative and not at all like someone with an inappropriate crush on a customer.  He does not blush, thanks.

 He is also currently sitting on the floor behind the counter surrounded by tiny bowls of pink cake batter, and he thinks his hands might be permanently stained a freaky blood red from the food dye. It’s not a shining moment.

 For once, Lardo swoops in to take Jack’s order (the usual vanilla for some poor asshole named Poots) while Bitty studies his face from behind a glass dish of cupcake samples.

 Jack might look a touch disappointed. He also might look bored, or sick, or sleepy. Hot Jack’s face is very beautiful but not very expressive.

 On the phone, Mrs. Williams’ voice reaches a new level of piercing. Bitty tugs on his hair in frustration and makes a mental note not to let Shitty and his feelings about the gender binary anywhere near this design. Finally, she winds down and lets him hang up with a promise to send her samples of every possible iteration of pink cake.

 Out of respect to the customer in the store, he only lets out a very small scream as he sets the phone back in its cradle. Conveniently, the phone is set up right next to the cash register where Lardo is finishing up Jack’s order.

 Across the counter, Jack’s face edges into something smile-adjacent. “Busy day, eh?”

 “Oh, you know how new moms are.” Bitty waves a hand airily. He certainly does not know how new moms are. He does know exactly what Jack Zimmermann looks like shirtless and oiled up on a magazine cover. “But it’s nothing I can’t handle.”

 “Yeah, you’re very tough. You can take those infants, show ‘em how it’s done.” Be still Bitty’s beating heart, Jack Zimmermann is teasing him.

 “Excuse _me_ , Mr. Zimmermann, are you making fun? Maybe I’ll just leave you to your own devices for all of these birthdays, then.”

 “Well, then I wouldn’t have a reason to keep coming back, would I,” says Jack with what is definitively a smile at this point.

 “I suppose you wouldn’t,” Bitty says primly. Lardo lets out the most blatantly obtrusive cough Bitty has ever heard and hands back Jack’s credit card. Jack blinks and stands up from where he was leaning on the counter.

 “Guess I’ll see you next birthday, then,” he says, walking backwards towards the door.

 Bitty waves. “I’ll be here!” Lardo jabs him with a sharp little elbow, and he amends to “Ouch, Lardo, Jesus H.— _we’ll_ be here!”

 Once Jack is gone, Lardo reaches up to rest a companionable hand on Bitty’s shoulder. Sunnily, she says, “I hate to meddle—”

 “You hush, you _love_ meddling.”

 “—But I have never seen a grown adult perk up like Hot Jack did when you hung up the phone. It was like watching the sun rise over a forest of maple trees. Majestic, honestly!” she finishes, patting Bitty’s cheek.

 “Oh my goodness, Lardo, you watch it,” Bitty demurs.

 “And I know he’s serious about you, because you definitely got a ton of that red dye all over your whole head while you were on the phone and he didn’t even blink,” Lardo says. She holds up the hand she touched his face with, and her fingers are stained red.

 Bitty freezes and slowly turns to check his reflection in the pastry case. True to Lardo’s word, his head looks like a crime scene. He has a fully formed bright red handprint on his forehead, and the dye evidently mixed with his pomade to create some kind of goopy reddish abomination around his hairline.

 “Lord help me, Larissa,” he says, slow and measured, “I am going to murder you.”

 “It’s like the haircut test!” Lardo chirps. “If you still like a guy after he gets a haircut, that’s how you know you’re really in deep. You still like a guy after he shows up looking like he killed a man with his bare hands—”

 Bitty grabs Lardo by her shoulders and rubs his disgusting head against hers vigorously while she laugh-shrieks and swats at him. If he accidentally kicks over all five bowls of pink cake batter in the struggle, it’s a small price to pay for revenge.

 

+

 

Bitty takes a long weekend to fly down to Georgia for his Moo Maw’s 90th, and when he’s on a plane back to Providence on Tuesday morning he certainly isn't thinking about how he’s missing Jack’s usual visit.

When he gets back in to open on Wednesday morning, all of his terrible coworkers are already there, seated suspiciously close to his worktable and staring intensely in a variety of directions. None of them have any reason whatsoever to in the back by the ovens, but if they want him to believe that they all urgently needed to rearrange the fridge at the same time, he can play along. At the very top of his pile of orders for the week, violating Ransom’s very strict chronological and alphabetical organizational system, is Jack’s order form.

Bitty picks up the sheet and pretends not to notice Lardo smacking Holster away with a cookie sheet so she can get a better view of his face. He scans the form, and it’s all Jack’s usual—vanilla with vanilla and vanilla, yellow and blue accents—except the writing. Instead of the ordinary birthday wishes, there in the Design box is a carefully rendered drawing of a cake with a phone number and a “Call Me” on top.

Holster, unable to contain himself for more than one second after the big reveal, says, “Isn’t that some rom-com shit? I guess he doesn’t really know that you’re the baker and you won’t actually, like, _see_ the cake he just paid $44.99 to ask you out with, but major style points here, I’m gonna have to try it—”

“Also, he remembers that his phone number is on every single order form, right?” Ransom interrupts.

Lardo shrugs. “He was all flustered, it was cute. I wasn’t gonna tell him.”

“Also also, do you think he knows colors other than the Falcs’ colors? Is there already such thing as yellow-blue colorblind, cause I think he might be the first recorded case,” says Ransom.

“Excuse me, you vultures, let me have my moment,” says Bitty.

Chowder pipes up. “Yeah, guys, give Bitty some alone time with his order form, it's an important moment in their _relationship_.”

“Alright, moment’s over, y’all’re fired, get out of my kitchen and go decorate some goddamn cakes.”

With a cornucopia of obnoxious eyebrow waggles, Bitty’s coworkers slink back out to the front room to do their jobs.

Bitty puts the number in his phone as Hot Jack with two cake emojis. If he sets the contact photo to a certain topless cover shoot, that's really nobody's business but his own.

**Author's Note:**

> Some details about bakery operations are fudged (because this is goofy wish fulfillment) and some are based on 100% true bakery experience (for example ransom and holster are decorators because at my bakery all the decorators were giant extremely loud dudes)
> 
> come say hi on [wrishwrosh.tumblr.com](tumblr)!


End file.
